garbowza

I resent him for creating a "difficult to learn" lifestyle that conveniently requires people to spend $2,800 per workshop to learn. The reason I resent that is because I'm jealous of how much money he makes.

This is fantastic. The essay feels more "shoot from the hip" and emotional than normal. It will certainly stay with me!

It's awesome to see not just a young person succeeding on their startup, but a female as well. Clearly female hackers are more rare than their male counterparts, so bravo to Ashley for blazing her own trail.

Large companies have built in processes for security, which slows down their software development, but also ensures better security than someone hacking together a site from scratch as quickly as possible.

Most of us hackers are jack of all trades, focusing on web design, databases, business logic, and security. It is difficult to be an expert in all areas while simultaneously focusing on speed of release. Just because a company has security experts doesn't guarantee secure software (Microsoft), but in many cases it does help.

I'm not sure I agree with him classifying those people who take a risk, but ultimately fail, as "morons." Although he also classifies those who don't take a risk (i.e. work at corporate jobs) as morons as well. I guess smart people are the ones who somehow succeed without ever first failing?

I've found that a ramification of holding the current program in my head is that I have a greater emotional bond with whatever problem I've most recently worked on.

If I work on several project concurrently, there's always one of them that I am more passionate about at any given time, causing me to think about it at nearly all hours of the day. Interestingly, the one I am more passionate about oscillates -- and is nearly always the project I have most recently worked on for a large chunk of time. Therefore, it is the one in which I am holding the most context in my head.

This isn't about training students to be cookie-cutter programmers. The concept is to provide the students with education on how to CREATE things. That is the opposite of cookie-cutter.

Good point, adamdoupe. I've created a large project in straight PHP and it was a mess. Now I work with CakePHP, a framework similar to Rails, and it's 100... no, 1000... times cleaner and more scalable!

I understand his point, but I think he supports it poorly. Of course a product that has 1 review is not likely to benefit greatly from that single review. But when I buy a product, or book a hotel, I look at dozens of reviews from other people and I get a good sense of the pros and cons of what I might buy. I can then gauge those perspectives against what is important to me. And I find that overall they are almost all correct -- in aggregate.

Finally... I'm not the only one that feels this way! This was a very well articulated essay. I obsessively avoid accumulation of objects because they dilute the actual value (to me, not a dollar amount) of the few things I actually enjoy.

Edward de Bono, the so-called grandfather of creativity, describes this approach in his groundbreaking book "Serious Creativity."

Basically you always want to generate ideas separately, then expand on them in a group. The reason is that a group approach from the start will squash somewhat crazy concepts before sufficient time has been put into making them practical. As a result, the most creative ideas are shot down before they are given a chance to be refined.

Instead, if you generate ideas on your own you can spend more time on a half-baked concept in order to round out its flaws. Then once its ready, other people can help provide different perspectives on the idea without shooting it down outright.

Therefore I don't see this article as simply advocating a single founder approach. However, co-founders should harden their new ideas on their own before proposing them to each other for critique.

I think the techniques that are being developed for consumer Web 2.0 apps will start penetrating the business market. And as mobile phone continue to gain location identification technologies, mobile apps will finally start gaining more market.

+1 for learn as you go! The best way to get all the requisite skills is to start building your best idea and letting the project itself tell you what you need to know.

Interesting take, epi0Bauqu. I think many hackers struggle with this concept because we are so focused on the creation, that once the product is created we are not sure what's next. And even if we do know, it oftentimes isn't as aligned with our core skills as the creation part is.

Being a huge sports fan, I am used to people apologizing after the fact and blaming the media for "misrepresentation" and taking their comments "out of context." However, I do applaud Seth Levine for at least addressing the issue. While the context of the comment in the USAToday article was addressed at YC, it did seem strange that Seth would blast the same model for which he contributes via TechStars.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, since to me it does seem reasonable that his comments were taken out of context.

No, even under "first to file" you cannot patent something where publicly accessible prior art exists. You can never patent something if it already exists in the public. The difference in first to file is that you can't pull up internal, private (i.e. NOT public) documents after the fact and say "look, here's proof I did it first" even though nobody could access that document.

Definitely self-serving move, and certainly won't make any difference in the end... articles like the USAToday one always need to find that contrarian view in order to seem unbiased. I'm sure Seth Levine was all to happy to provide them the material. But how would you feel if you were a Techstars startup group and you see him making comments like that - blasting the model of his partner's program!?

The nature of email is certainly shifting towards business dealings, as this article states. However, it's more than that: traditional email is also becoming a message aggregator. As social utilities, such as Facebook, MySpace, etc continue to utilize their own messaging systems, email acts as a feed reader to notify you when you have a message in any of your more specialized systems. So rather than it being the message itself, it becomes the messenger of a message.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) actually does perform this function and does include the U.S. It's PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) applications are valid for all member states, so it's essentially like submitting a patent application for each member state. However, WIPO applications are typically obtained in addition to separate U.S. and International patents rather than instead of, so it doesn't really serve the intended purpose.

This reform bill quite excellent and much needed, as it focuses on limiting patent litigation and outrageous infringement lawsuits. Shifting from "first to invent" to "first to file" actually helps prevent costly lawsuits. Under the current "first to invent," someone who files a patent can be invalidated by someone who claims they invented the idea first, but didn't take any action, which often results in expensive and time consuming litigation. Hopefully this bill makes it through the full vote...